Things That Make Me Go WOW

THINGS THAT MAKE ME GO WOW

I am not too sure what happened to me this week, I’m not a generally grumpy artist/person/human, but I woke up on Sunday morning with a banging headache and for the rest of the day everything irritated me. Literally everything.

Adverts on TV, irritating at the best of times and that lady who keeps telling me she loves Monday’s before she starts screaming and looking for a new job on an app, well that was probably the trigger. I was watching catch up tv where I couldn't skip the adverts on Sky Go.

Not too sure if you will have seen it if you are outside of the UK, but if you haven’t, just be thankful because it is one of the most annoying adverts in the history of ever and looks like it was produced on a budget of 3 and 6. (Pre-decimalisation rocks). Whatever they paid her for appearing in that advert just wasn’t enough. There is also a gentleman in a gladiator costume who looks like he hired it from a fancy dress shop and forgot to hire the sword.

After a few hours the head meds had kicked in, so I did what everyone who has just recovered from a headache does, I hit the caffeine and drank three large flat white coffees in the space of an hour. Full on Arabica beans, double shots. I had recovered enough to jump on Facebook, the second thing a person does after recovering from such a trauma.

THE CHAIN POST

This was to be the second trigger.

Please copy and paste this as your status if you know someone, or have heard of someone who knows someone that may know someone who knows anyone. If you don’t know anyone, or even if you’ve heard of anyone who doesn’t know anyone that doesn’t know someone, then still copy this. It’s important to spread the message. Oh, and the hearts. <3 <3 <3 for crap’s sake, don’t forget the hearts. <3 <3 <3

Followed by:

Please leave this on your timeline for at least two hours so that someone or anyone can get the message out. If you know someone who knows anyone who has been eaten by ninja pandas, please copy and paste this status. If not the chain will break and unicorns will die and we all love unicorns. But it is important that anyone who knows someone who knows anyone also sends this to every contact on their Messenger friends list just in case they know someone who knows anyone who has also been chomped on the ankle by a dragon. Amen. Don't forget to type Amen.

Sounds pretty lubricious right? Well apparently not so much because this week I counted almost a hundred posts all asking me to post this emotional stuff on my timeline. I know some will say we are collectively coming together to raise awareness for whatever cause, but to who? The Facebook algorithm only lets our Fine Art America art uploads get seen by two people unless we pay to boost it, and those uploads are way better than statuses asking us all to save Gollum.

Everyone seems to have figured out the emotional social media 'call to action', yet no one figured out the call to action which says just buy my dang artwork and click here.

So here's a suggestion for your next emotional post:

Don't Do It.

Anyone can write what they want on their Facebook walls, probably with the exception of asking people to go out and buy a copy of Mien Kampf because that's just wrong, or posting something that actually raises awareness of a serious yet under reported issue, because the algorithm will just shut that real awareness silliness right down. Fake news? No we're good with that, keep it coming, it wins elections. (Too soon?)

Will three people please copy and paste this status?

For the love of toasted crumpets how do you even get three people to see a post on Facebook in the first place? Hang on, I know the answer to that, post it on a hundred social-media networks and hope the algorithms are having a slow fake news day.

The status update used to say 'will ten people please copy and paste this status?' But the [Sic: spammer] person got smart and realised he or she had to lower the bar a bit because of that stupid algorithm. Alas, that particular update has never said ‘will ten people’ since it first did the rounds on Facebook in 1887. Kidding, Facebook only got released in 1888. (Source: a fake news site).

If you copy and paste this and send it to 30-people on Facebook Messenger in the next 20 seconds, within five minutes I can guarantee that absolutely nothing will happen. At 7 minutes people on Messenger will unfriend you because that ping noise woke them up. Not all of your Facebook friends live in the same time zone apparently.

Facebook chain statuses aren't all bad though. When sent via Facebook Messenger they serve as a world alarm clock. Someone in New York posts the important message at 7pm, their Facebook friend in London receives it immediately at midnight, as does the Facebook friend in Delhi who receives it at 04:30am. Now we're all wide awake, let's share the heck out of it, its important stuff, there’s no time to sleep.

Why don't Facebook give you a longer option to snooze notifications? 24-hours should be the absolute minimum. Oh hang on, apparently there is a way to snooze it for longer. This functionality is surprisingly easy to find, it's in the hidden menu called delete.

The minute someone figures out how a fully grown adult can get their hand comfortably inside a Pringles tub is the time to send a global notification through Messenger, or if Lego release a new grown up set. Beyond that global messages should be restricted, or Facebook should build in a delay so that the ping doesn’t go off until it has somehow confirmed you are awake and in the mood to engage.

SHOPS

We are out of bread. Those are words that every man dreads because they translate to ‘it’s your turn to go to the shops’.

I once thought there were only two types of shopper, those who purchased, and those who browsed. But then they invented the smart phone and with it the introduction of the crabby shopper.

Those people who start walking in front of you on the left, but it is clear that your mere presence is affecting their gravitational pull whilst they are looking at the screen, and as you move right they do a planetary wobble which first involves them moving right, then left, then no matter which way you go, they go.

These are the same people who see the six inch gap between you and the shelf you are looking at and walk right between you and the shelf. Yep, I wasn’t really looking at that. It should be over in seconds and the annoyance should go away quickly, except in between the six inches between you and the shelf, they stop to look at something on the same shelf too.

I may have mentioned clothes shopping previously. I just grab whatever is nearest the door. But meandering through a large department store yesterday I had noticed a particular lady holding a top up against her rather than going across the store to the changing rooms. On the front it said Guess, I’m guessing thyroid problems.

TRAINS

Don’t get me started on train travel. I have had experiences that no man should need to go through on trains. Fully grown adults wearing the cheapest headphones money can buy where the sound leaks out. I’m sensitive to noise at the best of times, but listening to Elvis Presley after a fifteen hour day isn’t ideal. It might be for some, but I really do prefer a little Rage Against the Machine after day like I just had.

Especially when said grown man decides to do a Dad dance in his seat discretely. So discretely it is obvious to everyone and you just know everyone around is looking at you because they feel pity that you have to sit next to the most annoying person on the train. Yet not one of those people offered to exchange seats despite seeing that I was in obvious trauma and getting bruised from his semi-robotic style of dance whilst sat in a seat about ten inches wide.

THE CONFERENCE CALL

In the current age of austerity and cut backs, staff all over the world are subjected to the workplace torture of conference calls. There should be laws about how much time you should spend with a mobile phone stuck against your ear. I suggest five minutes, per year at most.

Is it going to be over Skype, in which case I need to comb my hair and wear adult clothes above the waist, or will it be a dial-in, in which case I’m good staying in my hoodie and leaving my hair in its natural state. Or will it be over some weird system which requires a pin, password, input of your own number, and a download of the appropriate app?

And why are they always on a Friday?

When you do a conference call frequently you’ll find that you start saying out loud at the same time as the voice on the other end:

‘Hello, welcome to provider X conference call service. Please enter your six digit passcode now followed by the hash or pound sign’

and then you will hear, ‘please record your name after the tone followed by the pound or hash sign’, followed by:

‘for a list of conference controls please press the star key now’

Which is then followed by you getting the passcode wrong three times only to be finally met by ‘your chairperson has not arrived, please hold until your chairperson joins the meeting’

It gets worse from here on in, you will be subjected to random jazz music which is published under a Creative Commons licence by a jazz band who do the pubs on a Saturday night, once a year for £20 in cash and a free pint, split between the five of them.

Then when the chairperson finally manages to not hit snooze on the Outlook invitation fifteen minutes before remembering to join, you are greeted with forty-five beeps as people join. It's like telephone fireworks going off. Beep, beep, he, beep, llo, beep.

The introductions need an hour and it is critical that you write every name down. Bill will always be known as Bill because someone flushed the toilet when he said his surname, and three other people introduce themselves at the exact moment you did. You go first, who goes first? No, you go first, oh for the love of toffee, Mark here, hi everyone. But you just know that someone introduced themselves as Elvis, so at the end of the call everyone will hear that Elvis has left the call.

Four minutes later another beep with a ‘oh, sorry I’m late, got caught up on the underground’ (yet we all know Frank lives in Wales where the only underground tunnels are the coal mines in the valleys), followed by another beep when someone realises they are in the wrong meeting and leaves.

The mute button is a source of both good and evil. It’s great when you are boiling the kettle, not so great when you forget it is turned off during an episode of Tourette’s.

There will always be at least two out of every ten people on the call who dominate, and a further two who say nothing apart from introducing themselves, and finally saying ‘bye everyone, have a great weekend’ Those latter two are the real pro’s.

44-people are struggling for an answer that only you have, and exactly three seconds before a response is needed you start to apply camouflage paint across your now grinning face because you now hold the power. This is your moment, go ahead and shine. I guarantee there will be a stunned silence immediately after.

I mentioned the kettle, and anyone who is at the top of their game will know how to multi-task on a conference call. Multi-tasking is great until the moment someone multi-asks.

You’re asked a question and suddenly you realise you are woefully unprepared for this as Microsoft Solitaire had been occupying you for the 22-minutes the rest of the team took introducing themselves.

This is the exact point when the world catches you out. The giveaway is that you say, ‘sorry, you broke up slightly there, please could you repeat the question, I only caught my name?’

You know you have been caught out when one anonymous individual shouts ‘red five on black six’.

There are essentially only two types of people on a conference call. Those who ask awkward questions, and those whose soul mission in life is to get through sixty-minutes of this drivel without getting an action point. They have a strategy, and that strategy is to play dead.

"I hear what you are saying but let’s be very clear, our bottom line is linked to each of these four distinct areas in the swim lane you will find on slide twenty six of the slide deck I drop boxed across earlier, along with the key metrics we will use to provide the optics on this one".

What that essentially means is that they couldn’t be bothered in emailing just the key points and now your solitaire game is completely ruined because you need to log on to Drop Box, remember your username and password, and find the presentation amongst all the folders that you have been meaning to clean up.

Then you need to wait for the PowerPoint application to open. This is a serious danger to the art of multi-tasking because you need to do this in a hurry. Then Windows decides to apply an update and restart which makes you look like you hadn’t even fired up the PC in the first place. This is the exact moment when you can literally hear everyone's eyes rolling.

When it’s all over it is almost inevitable that someone will say ‘sorry I forgot to add...’ So here’s the best advice ever. As soon as, and I mean to the nearest millisecond here, as soon as you hear anything that denotes the end of the call, and immediately before anyone has any remote opportunity to drag it out, pull out the battery in your phone or hold the power button down at a distance so that you really can’t hear the final words.

If anyone asks if you heard the last question, the answer is no, my battery died just when Marie said see you all, and I didn’t hear the last bit at all. I really must get the IT department to sort that battery out. You know I have asked them before, and it is at this point they will walk away from the conversation. They know the IT department and they fully sympathise with you. If you pull this last element off convincingly, you can consider yourself a true professional.

I am glad to say that I am at last feeling a little better than I did on Sunday. I am hopeful that I will tackle next week a little better than I tackled this week but only time will tell. I will certainly try to not become quite so irritated with trivial things but there’s no guarantee.

So what irritates you? Please do leave a comment or you can follow me on the Facebook here or you can do both. You can also follow me on the Twitter thing @beechhouseart where I occasionally write interesting stuff too.

ABOUT M.A

Mark is an artist and blogger and lives in the UK. His artwork is available here Normally I would leave it up to you but please send this link to at least ten people on every social-media network you are on and ask them to copy and paste it into their timeline. We don’t want to see the end of the unicorns now do we?

Mark Taylor is a professional artist and blogger who supports other independent visual artists and creatives.
His work is sold online through Fine Art America, Pixels, and Zazzle, and through more than 150 retail locations across the USA, Canada, and the UK